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United Kingdom
Britain is a large island off the west coast of France and seperated from continental Europe by the English Channel. In all of the timelines listed below but the Ruled Britannia timeline, it was unified politically in 1603. Britain in Southern Victory Britain is, along with France, a primary ally of the Confederate States. The three nations defeated the US in the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War. After the latter Britain was rewarded by claiming half of the state of Maine as a territorial concession. The three then joined with Russia to form the Entente. During the Great War, Britain was forced to divide its army between Canada and northwestern Europe. The Royal Navy battled its American and German foes from the northern Atlantic through South America to the Pacific. Britain was the last of the Entente powers to sue for peace in 1917 (barring an untouched Japan) after her food supplies from Argentina and Australasia were cut off. The peace terms imposed upon Britain were harsh: London was forced to give independance to Ireland and Quebec, and to cede to the US anglophone Canada, Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas and the Sandwich Islands to the US. However, Britain was only defeated, not crushed like France and the Confederacy, and remained the dominant power from Africa through India to Australia. In the interwar years it suffered a defeat at the hands of Central Powers forces at Belfast, and in response to this defeat a rightwing coalition of Winston Churchill's Conservative Party and Oswald Mosley's Silver Shirts was elected as the Government. The British along with the French supported the winning Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War. In the Second Great War they are allied with Jake Featherston's CSA, the Action Francaise-controlled France and Tsarist Russia. They are at war with both the US and Germany. In Germany their early offensive successes stalled outside of Hamburg in 1942. They launched a disastrous attempt to outflank the German defenses by violating Norwegian neutrality in 1941 and as a result Norway declared for the Central Powers. Against the United States, Britain scored an early victory in a daring raid to capture its former colonies, Bermuda and the Bahamas, done in conjunction with the CSA. It felt the need to remind the Confederates that the blacks living in these territories were citizens of the Empire and would have their rights defended. The British are (somewhat reluctantly) supporting rebellion in Canada but have no realistic chance of returning to the North American mainland. They are active in the Northern Atlantic and may or may not have won a decisive victory over the German fleet early in 1943. However, unlike the First Great War, they have not been seen in the Pacific, leaving Entente interests there to their cobelligerent, Japan, whom they do not trust. Their suspicions proved well-founded; early in 1943, the Japanese abandoned the stalemated war around the Sandwich Islands and launched an offensive against British colonies in Asia. Britain in Worldwar Britain was a member of the Big Five, and hosted strategy meetings for that alliance in London. It was invaded by the Race in 1943-44, but repelled the invasion, becoming the first nation to utilize poison gas in the war against the Conquest Fleet in the process. It remained free after the war; however, it was stripped of its empire (with the exception of Northern Ireland) by the Race at the Cairo peace conference. It needed a more powerful ally to remain relevant in the postwar world and found this ally in Germany, which may have helped the British develop their atomic bomb. Politics in Britain became increasingly fascistic, and life became very hard for Britain's Jews, including RAF man and Lizard war veteran David Goldfarb, who ultimately defected to Canada. However, Britain did not join Germany in its 1964 second war against the Race although it did support its ally. After the war, when Germany was reduced to a shell of its former self by the peace imposed on it by the Race, Britain apparently lost its relevance in world and interworld affairs. As of 2031, Britain was not considered capable of making its own starship capable of journeying to Home in the foreseeable future, making it unique among the independent Tosevite powers. Britain in Ruled Britannia In ancient times, Britain was part of the Roman Empire. British nationalism inspired Queen Boudicca of the Icini to revolt against their rule. Though she was defeated, the story of her failed revolt inspired William Shakespeare to write the play Boudicca, which in turn touched off the successful revolt which restored Queen Elizabeth to England's throne. In Shakespeare's and Elizabeth's own time, Britain was divided between two kingdoms: England and Scotland, which remained independent through the decade in which England was ruled as part of the Spanish Empire. However, as of Elizabeth's restoration to the throne, Scotland's King James VI was her closest living relative. Were James to succeed Elizabeth upon her death, Britain would be united under a single king. Britain in In the Presence of Mine Enemies Britain is an occuppied territory of the Germanic Empire as of 2010 and is ruled by the pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists who have a reputation of being violent thugs who fight each other freuqently. During the Second World War, Britain and Russia fought against Germany, Italy and Japan and both were defeated due to the United States of America remaining in isolation and neutrality. During the war, much of the British capital London was destroyed by German dive bombers and panzers, and during the last-ditch resistance by Winston Churchill and his supporters during the Second World War. The description suggests a Stalingrad-like resistance, though in this case ending with a German victory. Key British buildings including the British Parliament, Big Ben and St. Paul's Cathedral were completely destroyed with their only remaining legacy being photographs. Following its defeat, Britain was occupied by the Reich which began genociding Jews, Slavs, Arabs, Negros and other races considered inferior. The Nazis presumably went after British wartime political and military leaders and placed them on trial and had them executed or imprisoned. Britain was also ruled by collaborationist and pro-Nazi people like Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists which became the only legal political party in Britain. Britain was also presumably forced to give up its colonial empire which was promptly divided up among the Axis Powers. Its African colonies were taken over by the Germans, Italians, Portuguese and Spanish while Japan occupied Britains former territories in the Far East and the Pacific Ocean along with Australia and New Zealand. It is unknown what happened to Britain's colonies in the Americas like Canada, Bermuda, the Bahamas and Guyana though it is likely they were controlled by a British government in exile in Canada or the United States or if they were even taken over by the Reich itself of the United States. The German occupation was hard on most British with the British economony experiencing a hyper-inflation due to the harsh war reparations and the Reich pegging the Reichmark artificially high. Partisan uprisings against the occupation authorities were often harsly put down with captured partisans and their families and friends executed. The last partisan uprisings were only put down in the mid 1970s during the Third World War against the United States. Though most of Britain was rebuilt, it never recovered to pre-war levels and some areas in London remained in ruins for over seventy years since the end of World War Two. In 2010, one of the characters Susanna Weiss visits London to attend an annual convention of the Medieval English Association at the Silver Eagle hotel in London which is also where the BUF is having its annual congress. With the death of the third Fuhrer Kurt Waldheim, the calls for reform in the Reich and the Germanic Empire grow louder and the process of reform begins in Britain. The BUF under the influence of the newly-elected British prime minister Charles Lynton starts cautious moves to get as independent as possible of German domination. The revival of democratic ideas is at first cloaked as being adherence to Nazi ideals in their purity, specifically the assertion that Hitler supported democracy in the first edition of Mein Kampf and that his purported democatic ideals had been later falsified. This is followed by the coming to power of a reform-minded Fuhrer named Heinz Buckliger in Germany itself. Buckliger makes a speech to the party leaders gathered at Nurmeberg, whose exact text is kept secret but in which, according to widely circulating rumors, the new Fuhrer denouced his predecessors and stated that the in the past the Reich committed crimes. When conservative elements of the Reich which oppose change under the Reichsfuhrer-SS Lothar Pruttzmann launch a coup and reinstate Odilo Globocnik as the new Fuhrer, Charles Lynton was among the many other world leaders who protested the coup and eventually Buckliger was put back in power. Britain Britain Britain Britain Britain